Hours after a fatal collision at New York’s LaGuardia airport last March, America’s accident investigation agency dispatched one of its top air traffic control specialists to the scene.

She barely made her flight. At the time, a partial government shutdown meant security agents at US airports were not being paid and often did not show up for work. Travellers across the US were forced to wait hours to be screened.

Aides had to “beg” officials in Houston to get the investigator out of the queue she’d been stuck in for three hours and on to her flight to New York, said Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board.

“It’s been a really, a really big challenge to get the entire team here, and they’re still arriving as we speak,” she told reporters the day after the crash.

America’s air transport system is under strain as never before. Insiders speak of near misses in the air and of staffing shortages in critical sectors that have heightened concern about passenger safety.

With traveller numbers at near-record levels, congestion is rising around major hubs while occasional federal government shutdowns are wreaking havoc on operations. Frequent flight delays and cancellations caused by technology outages have prompted federal auditors to warn of the danger posed to air safety by ageing infrastructure.

The World Cup, which is bringing millions of football fans to venues across the US, will only ratchet up the pressure — just as the summer travel season peaks.

“The US system moves a lot of traffic very efficiently and has for years, but it’s super-strained by a lack of funding and understaffing,” says Brian Vogelsinger, a former Chicago-based air traffic controller.

Vogelsinger is not the only one to worry about the staffing crisis in his profession. The National Air Traffic Controllers’ Association (Natca) puts the shortfall at 3,800. That means a lot more work for those currently in the system.

“Forty per cent of our facilities are working six days a week, 10 hours a day,” says Anthony Schifano, a controller in Charlotte, North Carolina. “Some of these people . . . never see a weekend off.” 

Sixty-hour work weeks are “absolutely a thing”, he adds. “Any time you’re asking a human to do that . . . it inherently introduces a lot more stress into their lives.”

Some experts warn the strain on controllers could also compromise safety. “I don’t think anyone in good conscience could stand up . . . and say right now the United States is doing everything it can to prevent future aviation tragedies,” says Bill McGee, senior fellow for aviation and travel at the progressive campaign group American Economic Liberties Project. “We’re still short thousands — not hundreds, thousands — of air traffic controllers.”

Tip of the iceberg

Controllers are essential to ensuring the safety of US skies. They direct aircraft during take-off and landing, keep planes separated in the air and manage their movements on the ground. They underpin a system that typically handles around 44,000 flights and nearly 3mn passengers a day.

The job they do is becoming increasingly complex, as drones, commercial space launches and emerging air-taxi operations enter and spread through US airspace.

Controllers are federal government employees in the US in contrast to the UK, where they are employed by a public-private partnership. On one recent day they moved a record 55,000 flights, says Nick Daniels, head of Natca. “And we’re doing that in a staffing crisis.”

Lawmakers have sounded the alarm. “Placing the lives of our constituents in the hands of civil servants who are overworked and utterly exhausted was and remains unfair, unacceptable and ultimately dangerous,” Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator, told Congress in December.

The situation is so dire that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which oversees air traffic control, identified “controller workload” as an “emerging risk factor”, along with system demand, according to congressional testimony by FAA head Bryan Bedford last December.

In response to the increased risk, the FAA temporarily reduced operations at 40 high-traffic airports, Bedford told lawmakers — a move likely to have piled on the misery for already hard-pressed travellers.

Controllers’ tough working conditions have been named as a factor in two recent incidents that shocked the US. In January 2025 an American Airlines plane collided with a US Army Black Hawk helicopter as it was approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National airport in DC. All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed, making it the deadliest accident in US commercial aviation since 2001.

An investigation by the NTSB said a key reason for the crash was the placing of a helicopter route close to the runway approach path. But it also cited the “high workload” of the air traffic controllers at Reagan, which had led to a “loss of situation awareness and degraded performance”. 

The probe revealed that one controller was handling both helicopter and aeroplane traffic at the same time on the night of the accident.

Similar issues were revealed when experts analysed the March incident at New York’s LaGuardia, in which a Canadian airliner collided with a fire truck on the runway, killing two pilots.

A preliminary NTSB report found there were two air traffic controllers in the airport’s tower the night of the crash, but one was handling two positions while the second was dealing with a separate emergency.

Homendy, the NTSB chair, said it was standard operating procedure at the airport to have only two controllers on duty during the midnight shift. But employees there had been expressing concern about that set-up “for years”: she said she understood why, “especially if there’s a heavy workload”.

“There’s a groundhog day quality to this,” says McGee, the aviation fellow. “We continually talk in this country about fixing air traffic control . . . and we never seem to get there.”

The incidents at LaGuardia and Reagan are just the tip of the iceberg, according to experts.

“There’ve been plenty of close calls and near misses in the system,” says former Chicago controller Vogelsinger. “And you have to believe from watching it working that fatigue plays a part in that.”

The near misses rarely enter the public domain, but they leave a trace in the Nasa Aviation Safety Reporting System, which collects aviation safety incidents and situation reports voluntarily submitted by pilots, air traffic controllers and others.

One pilot reported an incident in the ASRS from October 2025 at Newark Airport in which he suddenly noticed a helicopter passing above his plane over the approach end of the runway.

Air traffic control “never notified us of this traffic”, which he “didn’t see . . . until very late because there are a few blind spots in the cockpit”. He said there might well have been a collision.

“We didn’t say anything to ATC [air traffic control] at the moment since they were dealing with an emergency aircraft which was probably a bit distracting for everyone,” he wrote.

As for ATC’s failure to notify him of helicopters passing over the approach to one of Newark’s two main runways, he added, “this wasn’t the only time that I’ve been in this situation”.

Floppy disks and copper wire

The roots of understaffing stretch back decades. In 1981, then president Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air traffic controllers, about 65 per cent of the workforce. Many experts say the system has never fully recovered from that bloodletting.

Other factors have exacerbated the shortfall. In 2013, the FAA was forced to institute a hiring freeze after a stand-off between Democrats and Republicans over the debt ceiling led to an across-the-board cut to government agencies’ budgets.

Then came the 35-day government shutdown in 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term. That caused big delays in hiring and in training, which even in normal times takes years, costs ATC hundreds of thousands of dollars and sometimes only equips controllers to handle particular airports.

The Covid-19 pandemic also disrupted plans to expand the workforce.

John Gradek, faculty lecturer in aviation management at McGill University in Montreal, says the system globally is still dogged by the “long tail of Covid”. Many countries, he says, reduced their ATC workforce during the pandemic, leaving them with acute staff shortages when demand for air travel rebounded in 2022.

The FAA now has ambitious plans to make up the deficit. It says it will “supercharge” hiring, taking on roughly 8,900 controllers by 2028, including 2,200 this year. It will streamline the ATC hiring process, raise student starting salaries and offer financial incentives to controllers to stay on beyond retirement age.

However, under a new FAA workforce plan released earlier this year, the agency said it is lowering its target for fully certified controllers from 14,633 to 12,563 — a reduction of 2,070 positions.

It said it could make do with fewer personnel than earlier envisaged thanks to technology and scheduling improvements.

The move has sparked outrage among controllers, with unions pushing back against attempts to change working practices and use technology to cut down on staff. “We can’t contradict ourselves and say we want supercharged hiring and then reduce how many people we hire,” says Schifano, who is facility representative at Charlotte Airport for NATCA, the controllers’ association.

Jonathan Stewart, who used to work as a supervisor for Newark’s Terminal Radar Approach Control facility before leaving the FAA in May, almost a year to the day after a near-collision on his watch, says the strategy is risky. “By trying to run the controllers longer than they’re already running them, so that they can say they can make do with fewer people, they’re going to increase fatigue and introduce more risk into the system,” he says. 

Hiring levels are just one of the weaknesses of the system. The other is equipment.

The risks of ageing technology were on full display in April last year in Newark Liberty International Airport, in New Jersey. Controllers overseeing Newark’s airspace experienced a 90-second blackout of radar and radio contact with air traffic, leaving them “unable to see, hear or talk to” planes under their control, according to Natca. The cause of the outage was a burnt copper wire: the FAA blamed “our antiquated traffic control system”.

Officials have been raising the alarm about the integrity of such systems for years. Last year the FAA presented an operational risk assessment of all the US’s 138 ATC systems, which found 37 per cent of them “unsustainable”.

Natca’s Daniels says systems are not as integrated as they should be. “We all use separate equipment . . . [and] none of them talk the same language,” he says. “It’s having multiple different computer sets plus additional add-ons and bolt-ons to other information display systems . . . We need to get to . . . a seamlessly integrated common automation platform.”

The Trump administration has acknowledged the problem. “Floppy disks, copper wires and rotary phones — this is the kind of outdated equipment our system relies on to manage aviation,” Sean Duffy, transportation secretary, wrote in June last year.

To rectify the situation, he said, some $12.5bn allocated in Trump’s spending bill would be used to pay for state of the art radar, fibre optic lines and new radios. Congress allocated another $5bn last year for FAA facilities and equipment.

The increased budgets have already been put to good use, the FAA’s Bedford told lawmakers in December. “We’ve already transitioned more than one-third of the old copper infrastructure to fibre, and we’re deploying our first digital radios and voice switches,” he said.

But at the same hearing, he also acknowledged that the $5bn would not be spent on new buildings and other infrastructure: 85-90 per cent of it would go towards repairs, replacing defective equipment, painting and plumbing. “I mean, frankly, we’re putting lipstick on a pig,” he told lawmakers.

‘Not best practice’

For some, though, the problems of the US aviation sector lie deeper — in the structure of the FAA itself.

The agency is unusual in that it is both the US safety regulator and the operator of the US’s air traffic control system. This means that it depends for its funding on congressional appropriations, which are at the mercy of government shutdowns and budget battles. In the UK, by contrast, these two functions are separate.

The system in the US “is not best practice”, says Mike Whitaker, who led the FAA during the Biden administration.

The US should follow the UK example and place air traffic control into a separate organisation with an independent board, financed by fees paid by the airlines, he says.

“So that takes you out of this . . . doomloop that keeps happening, when every time there’s a shutdown all the modernisation programmes stop, all the training of controllers stops, which is just incredibly disruptive,” he says. “It has exacerbated the inability to modernise.”

US air traffic controllers were already stressed when a budget fight late last year led to what turned out to be — at 43 days — the longest ever government shutdown.

Schifano, the controller in Charlotte airport, says one colleague of his was told by doctors he needed a kidney transplant. “He has a lot of medical bills, he’s living pay cheque to pay cheque,” he says. Yet the shutdown meant he wasn’t being paid.

“You can just imagine what it feels like for him and his family,” he says.

For Vogelsinger, the former controller in Chicago, the overwork was all too much. He calculated he worked 330 hours of overtime in 2024, and had only 60 regular days off, instead of the 104 he was due.

“I found myself working six days a week, missing family stuff and being totally worn out,” he says. Other colleagues were similarly stressed. “The morale was definitely down,” he says. “People feel stuck.”

That is when he took the radical decision to leave the FAA, where he had worked for almost 21 years, and take up a job in air traffic control in Australia.

“I’m so much less stressed, and have way more time off,” he says. “Here they say, in Australia you work to live, not live to work.”

Additional reporting by Peter Campbell